DAN'S PAPERS, July 31, 2009 Page 22 www.danshamptons.com
Illegal
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perform this service as a sort of cattle drive. Those brought to their courts stand in line and then appear before them for less than 30 seconds. They are asked for their name and if they have papers. If the answer is no to the second, they are found guilty, then held in jail until deportation. I know there are a great many people who believe that illegal immigrants are taking away jobs from otherwise qualified Americans. There are also those who feel that America is built on immigration, both legal and illegal, and once here, people should be allowed the freedoms ordinarily afforded to all of us. This situation, from two years ago, however, is an entirely different thing. It is reminiscent of Stalin’s purges in Russia and Hitler’s fascism in Germany. Albert Einstein himself, along with his wife, was awakened in the middle of the night in Germany by Gestapo agents who said they had a report he had weapons. They left with his kitchen knives. When Einstein summered out here on the East End in 1939 this was a story he told to people who asked about it. It had happened just three years before. He had gotten the message. The next day, Einstein and his wife left. What is going on with these nighttime raids — and they are continuing — has about as much to do with looking for “fugitives” as the Gestapo invading Einstein’s Munich home looking for “weapons.” It is, instead, about the Hispanics getting the message. And they have. Many of them, even those who are here legally, now spurred on by the economic slowdown, are going home. So
much for the American way of life, our Constitution and democracy in America. This behavior by Immigration is a disgrace. What has led the Immigration police to do this, they tell us, is that they have a “mandate” they were given by the President three years ago. The mandate, according to them, was to track down fugitives — those who are wanted for crimes committed — and, if it turns out there is a belief they might be in someone’s home, go in there in the middle of the night with a search warrant and get them. Since fugitives might exit out a window as they entered, “collateral arrests” were permissible. As you probably know from watching TV, to break into a home in the middle of the night requires a judge’s signature on a search warrant. You can wake a judge up in the middle of the night to get it if you want, if it is that important to get. Guess what? No judge ever signed an order authorizing a legal search warrant for these operations. This week, there has been astonishing news about these events. In Connecticut, a judge threw out a deportation order against four illegal immigrants arrested during a nighttime raid. The ruling said there was no proper warrant issued, there was no probable cause, and there was no knock on the door with the approved consent of those inside to let these people in. These four can stay in Connecticut. Last Wednesday, a report was released by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. It had analyzed the records of all these break-ins in the states of New Jersey and New
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York in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Besides the fact that all were done without proper search warrants, they came up with the following results. Beginning in early 2006, Immigration put together 100 fugitive operations teams around the country to fulfill its mandate. During the next three years, these teams made nearly 80,000 arrests around the country, nearly four out of five involving people of Hispanic descent. As for “fugitives,” they found almost none. The fugitives, people on the run from criminal charges, were apparently picked out of a hat and simply assigned to one particular Hispanicappearing home or another. And so it was on that pretext they went in. Here on Long Island, the report documents 100 raids between January 2006 and April 2008. In only 14 of these cases did the people inside offer consent to come inside. As a result of these 100 raids, there were nearly 500 “collateral” arrests, and of those detained, 473 were Hispanic. The report was prepared for the law school by students and faculty and clerks hired to gather the data in a department of the law school called the Immigration Justice Clinic. Its director, Peter Markowitz comments, at the end of the report, that “the widespread illegality by a law enforcement agency should be kind of shocking to anybody.” The report ends with some recommendations. It says that the use of home raids — with a judge’s warrant, of course — should be limited to the search for only those who pose a serious risk to national security or have violent crimi(continued on page 26)
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